Known in the art is an internal combustion engine which arranges a hydrocarbon feed valve in an engine exhaust passage, which arranges an exhaust purification catalyst downstream of the hydrocarbon feed valve inside the engine exhaust passage, which carries precious metal catalysts on exhaust gas flow surfaces of the exhaust purification catalyst and is formed with basic exhaust gas flow surface parts around the precious metal catalysts, which injects hydrocarbons from the hydrocarbon feed valve by a predetermined period of within 5 seconds at the time of engine operation, and thereby removes the NOX which is contained in the exhaust gas (for example, see Patent Literature 1). In this internal combustion engine, even if the temperature of the exhaust purification catalyst becomes a high temperature, a high NOX purification rate can be obtained.